This article discusses plot details from throughout Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.

There’s the popular saying, especially among younger people, that goes: “Why should I have kids, when the world is so fucked up?” Why inflict horrors on an innocent babe, thrust helplessly into humanity’s interminable spiral of war, death, and environmental destruction? Existing parents are semi-seriously castigated as selfish breeders who decided to procreate in spite of the likelihood that there will be no future for their children to grow into.

In Death Stranding 2, the situation is flipped. The world has already ended, but everyone is dying to have children anyway, to bring new life into this deranged and dejected place. Children serve as a form of currency in Death Stranding 2. Bridge Babies, the stillborn fetuses of brain dead mothers, allow porters to navigate around the deadly ghosts that plague the surface of the world. Though they could not be born, they still serve a vital and protective function.

It's revealed part way through Death Stranding 2 that most of the connections our hero, Sam Porter Bridges, made in the previous game, were secretly fueled by the sacrificial deaths of dozens of Bridge Babies. Their connection to the afterlife apparently serves as the accelerant necessary to generate the weird ghost-technological grid that connects cities and bunkers around the surviving world. These babies’ sacrifice signals a desire for children taken to perverse lengths, a desire to procreate not in order to seed the future but to create vessels which will only maintain a stagnant and moldering world.

We meet Tomorrow when Sam rescues her from her own moldering world partway through the game. Played by Elle Fanning with bright-eyed and cherubic earnestness, she carries herself like a wounded infant, a child in a twenty-something woman’s adult body. We learn eventually that she, in fact, is Sam’s estranged daughter, the same Lou who was taken from him at the end of the game’s first act. In an attempt to rescue her from certain death, Fragile sent her to a distant beach where she grew up alone, her only companions ghosts and tortured memories.

Everyone on board your team’s base, the DHV Magellan, takes immediately to Tomorrow and acts as her adoptive guardians, nobody more so than Rainy, who spends hours playing games with her and teaching her elementary school lessons. Rainy is pregnant herself, but stuck in an endless third trimester, host to a baby who will not leave the womb. Her child remains disconnected from the future, as if afraid to be born into the nightmarish present.

Sam, not knowing his biological connection to Tomorrow, struggles to connect with her. He squeezes past her on his way through the Magellan’s tight corridors, exchanging an awkward grunt or a nervous glance. He cannot bridge the gap between them, choosing instead to trudge outdoors and do the simple masculine work of delivering heavy boxes, while the women of his life stay home and tend the child.

But Sam clearly wants more, wants a child—wants back the child he lost. He bears the cross-like scar of a bullet wound in his midsection, which also looks like the place a uterus would go. The first game ends with Sam giving metaphorical birth to Lou by breaking her free from her embryonic pod, splashing the floor with an amniotic-looking fluid. A tense scene ensues in which he attempts, for what feels like an eternity, to palpate her tiny lifeless body, before finally bringing her back to life. 

The second game continues where the first left off, depicting Sam raising little Lou, who is now a toddler. He takes her on walks, cooks her meals, and decorates his bunker with bright colors and toys. This touching moment of nascent fatherhood is promptly cut short when Sam’s bunker is attacked by Higgs’ forces and Lou is apparently killed. Sam’s desire for a child is so strong that he hallucinates Lou back into existence, manifesting her presence within her old embryonic pod.

The fierceness of this desire seems alien, unimaginable. In this world, so ruined, so bereft of hope, how can Sam honestly still want to raise a new life? To carry a child with him as he faces endless dangers and mounting violence? There is a palpable sense of loneliness when playing the game as a solitary, childless Sam; to completing the vast majority of his tasks without Lou, accompanied instead by the similarly bereaved Dollman. Two sad, isolated men, separated from their young, unable to lead them through the world, or care for them, or teach them.

Parenting, at its most optimistic, is about looking toward the future. Children don’t just have to be victims, cruelly subjected to a decaying world. They may be beacons of hope, signifiers of survival and the will to push on. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, a world without children is a world without hope, a world steadily sliding into oblivion. The most powerful scene in the film is when a pitched battle between the army and the rebellion is interrupted by the innocent cries of a newborn baby. Everyone in this dead and dying world stops what they’re doing. They put down their guns and stand in awestruck silence, like the wise men who visited Mary. They’re in the presence of incontrovertible proof that the future is possible, that the book has a new page, that the sun will rise at the end of this endless night.

The past necessarily falls short of the future. Sam, after all, has failed Lou/Tomorrow. She had to grow up alone, in a bizarre and inhuman space. But she does grow; she does become something miraculous in the meantime, all on her own. Our children will live and grow to exist beyond us. All we can do is our best. 

Here the lie is put to the idea that not having children is the ethical, responsible choice. Putting aside whether parenthood feels like the right decision on its own merits, to foreclose on the entire possibility of children because of a fear of the future is to foreclose on the future itself. To not have hope that a child you bear can make it is to lose all hope that you can make it, that any of us can make it. What is the plan, then, following this logic? To fulfill your ethical duty of abstaining from parenthood, to live out the remainder of your life, just to die? To die in a future you’ve already surrendered to? Alternatively, you can fight. You can fight for your child, for the idea of children. You can fight to make the world better, fight for a future beyond yourself, beyond what can possibly be imagined.

At some point during Death Stranding 2’s lengthy finale, Lou/Tomorrow saves Sam. Despite her designation as an Extinction Entity, her destiny to end humanity once and for all, she goes a different way, her own way. Lou/Tomorrow saves Sam from Higg’s dastardly machinations and reduces Higgs to dust, granting him a peaceful oblivion. She does so as an adult, as a separate and self-contained being, someone who wasn’t really raised by Sam and doesn’t belong to him as a child does a parent. Like parenthood in general, nothing about this scenario is perfect or ideal. The future won’t be either. But taking positive action in service of it—not simply giving up and letting extinction swallow us whole—is a good place to start.

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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.